Wireless broadband standards defined by, for example, by the Institute of Electrical Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) such as IEEE 802.16 Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX), provide an enhanced platform for the delivery of data, video, and voice with wireless signals between a base station and a subscriber. The WiMAX standard requires a high level of QoS and scheduling support to enable the delivery of wireless traffic in a communications network. But, the standard does not define specific scheduling algorithms, leaving room for flexibility among vendor implementations. Wireless broadband vendors want to reduce their cost while providing the highest quality broadband service to their customers.
The efficiency, throughput, and service quality of a communication system largely depend on the scheduler. Scheduling is a complex and time consuming task performed by a base station. The base station handles many wireless connections with varying QoS requirements such as maximum sustained data rate, minimum reserved data rate, maximum latency, and tolerated jitter in real-time. Existing algorithms use a significant amount of processing time to perform the necessary scheduling tasks while optimizing system throughput and determining QoS requirements. Even if the system is not overloaded, data packets may be dropped by the scheduler because the algorithms can not guarantee QoS while optimizing the system throughput. As a result, WiMAX enabled base stations are necessarily equipped with expensive hardware, including high-end processors. This increases costs for the wireless broadband vendors.